There's been a lotta whining and grousing about the launch of video for Flickr Pro users today, with criticism largely polarising around the 90-second limit or elitist fears of a YouTube-style pollution of the pristine Flickr community. I these concerns will be largely unfounded...

I suspect most users will be recording video 'before and after' a photo is taken. Perhaps such a contextualising video to accompanying a Flickr photo will be seen in time as no different than geotagging an image...it's just extra contexty :)

Brevity in video is maybe not a bad thing. 140 character limits on Twitter have only enhanced the creativity of that community...

Flickr's full of good and bad photographers. There's no reason to assume they'll be any more or less skilled at 'videography'. The Flickr community is actually very good at collectively surfacing the best contributions and with video only available to Pro users, that'll act as an additional filter.

Flickr's a little more personal than YouTube- it's largely photos for friends and family, rather than a wider broadcast. You're more likely to see cute clips of a friend's niece - like this - than a trailer for Iron Man.

I tend to shoot a handful of videos with my point & shoot or phone when I'm taking a whole lotta photos. When I'm looking at the photos of my nephew's first visit, it makes sense to me that all the related media is contextualised in the same place, by the same application. I don't wanna create a mashup, I just want to post.

I think Flickr made the right choices...now I'm just hoping I'll be able to MMS video from my phone to Flickr real soon :)

May, October and January appear to be my peak usage months; not much to be inferred here other than I seemed to get in the habit around Spring last year.

My twitters are largely concentrated in the afternoons and evenings of weekdays, sent overwhelmingly using Twitterific and less so by text message.

Unsurprisingly most of my direct messages are to Tarique, though I'm curious why friends like Aaron are low down that list; this may be due to the fact that Twitter's one of the few communication services I use that most of my friends don't, but my family do!

It'd be useful to see sparklines of this data on a Twitter profile page that then clicked through to Twitterstats. Actually, more useful would be to visualise the aggregate usage of the entire Twitter userbase...

Thinking about the nature of relationships within my Twitter social network, I think it's safe to say they're largely polarised around looser ties, than close friendships (for which I have other channels such as IM) and close family...though I think the large concentration of family members here is kinda a blip and not typical of Twitter usage.

Today, Blognation UK has a full roundup of exhibitors and I'm really pleased to see that two of the eleven (that's 18%!) companies at Expo are from the North of England - Yuuguu and meecard, respectively based in Manchester and Sheffield. A few hours ago, Andy Mitchell, co-founder of meecard, was kinda enough to send me a thank you note :)

meecard and Yuuguu at FOWA are important precedents, particularly with FOWA's international outlook, underlining the fact that London's not the only place to to business for 2.0 entrepreneurs.

{ Disclosure - I've been a paid strategist/advisor for Yuuguu in the past }

I've been tinkering with Dopplr for a couple months and I've found it to be an app that embodies much of what I'm liking about digital design at the moment.

I'm not traveling enough right now to really benefit from Dopplr's 'increased serendipity', but I love to just play with Dopplr, exploring aimlessly...the same kinda pleasure derived from using OS X, the iPod interface or the clean utility of the Googlehome page.

Dopplr's design is an elegant embodiment of simplicity and utility...the kind of simplicity embodied by Maeda's Laws and we wish to employ in both Believr and mee:view. I hope we'll do as good a job as Matt Jones, Dopplr's Director of Design. Matt spoke about some of the influences in Dopplr's design at Reboot 9.0 - Travel & Serendipity...

Sadly, the chain of events which led to Sam's dismissal from TechCrunch UK continued to have repercussions that unfortunately overshadowed the conference itself...

Michael Arrington, proprietor of the CrunchNetwork decided to put TCUK on hold, locking out Sam, Mike Butcher and contributors like myself without any warning...though I later managed to recover my password, I figured it was impolite to continue posting!

Michael later posted his perspective on the events leading up to the dismissal and closure.

I have sympathy for Sam, Mike A and Mike B's positions, more so for Natali...each seemed to face unfortunate choices. Le Meur however conducted himself appallingly; I've read reacted similarly to criticism last year too. This is a shame, he's someone who appears to be quite likable and has great enthusiasm and energy - there was no need for his outburst; Sam was justified in his criticisms.

In just three-and-a-half months, Sam and Mike B lifted TCUK from a standing start and located it at the centre of the UK tech scene. Those of us at the periphery, as contributors and writers, were planning to extend coverage and events around the UK, energising entrepreneurs and innovators wherever they existed. TCUK was doing good work and pretty much for free!

TCUK was more than a brand and a blog, it was the sum total of relationships and trust developed by its contributors; that won't dissipate...it'll follow Sam and Mike to whatever they plan to do next. I hope TCUK will relaunch soon as well as Sam and Mike's new venture - a competitive news landscape for the tech industry is healthy and neccessary.

--

UPDATE: Sam and Mike are back on the air as Vecosys, tracking European statups...great news and I wish 'em both the best of luck. Unfortunately, the spat between Sam and Michael Arrington appears to be getting uglier and distracting from real industry news.

The newly redesigned Zopa site, includes a cute visualisation of the service's borrowers and lenders. Designed by Poke, the visualisation emphasises the person-to-person nature of Zopa's communal banking - humanising loans for its customers. I remember the ultra-cute Israeli IM service, Odigo, included a similar feature showing a 'radar' of all Odigo user's at a particular URL.

I wonder if the visualisation could be absracted and applied to other social networking datasets...indeed, it looks a little like Steven Blyth's Social Fabric...incidentally, Steven now works for us at France Telecom R&D's UK office :)